Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1 // Summer 2021]

The recent interview of Elon by Tim Dodd is probably more informative and interesting this this could ever be. [VIDEO]

I can see this as being a real story. I just finished watching this really very interesting interview with Elon as he walks around the spacex stuff [VIDEO] He got vocally and visibly annoyed with the beeping noises that the machines were making. It was a useless cacophony of beeps and you could just see in his head he was thinking "How the hell do I make this better and quieter"

This series is said to eventually have three parts. Part one [0] and two (this submission) were filmed at the production site "Starbase" (Boca Chica village, Texas). The third and last part is going to be at the launch site, a few kilometers/miles further to the east, right next to the beach. Part three has not been released yet. Tim Dodd usually makes a good interview partner for Elon Musk because he is more knowledgable about rockets than most reporters and can ask way more interesting questions than they could. If you haven't seen the first part yet, I would recommend to start with it [0] instead of jumping right into this one. [0] Part 1: [VIDEO] (53 minutes long!)

Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept. 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb", or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. [VIDEO]

Everyday Astronaut's walk and talk with Elon Musk where he attempts to explain his management process, starts at 13:30 of part 1: [VIDEO] Here's a rough summary: 1. Make requirements less dumb. 2. Delete part or process steps. If you're not occasionally adding things back (he says 10%) (ideally in improved versions), you're not removing things often enough. 3. Simplify, optimize, solve. Everyone's trained to jump to this because the educational process requires you to answer a question as posed, when often the question is dumb and shouldn't be dealt with as-stated. 4. Accelerate process 5. Automate Those tend to blur together at the edges. I'm sure if he formalized this and wrote it down for mass consumption it'd be presented differently, but it's his current mental model. Process testing - remove unnecessary in-process testing after production line debugging is done. Obviously there are nuances, he's not saying to do no in-process testing, but rather to remove testing which was intended to reveal information once that's already been collected and addressed. He cautions about false positives from in-process testing, and notes most testing can be done end of line with acceptable results. Finally, it's important to understand the context. The part about part/step deletion in particular, when things get added back 10% of the time, is not appropriate for all development processes. That would have to be adjusted a the specific product and market objective.

> This is objectively false. I commend the response by user panick21 and would add that you can watch Elon Musk demonstrate his acumen in this three part interview on Everyday Astronaut. You can't fake this kind of breadth and depth of knowledge. [VIDEO]

Watch this walk around Starbase with Elon and Tim Dodd, and you'll get a pretty good sense that he has an engineering brain that really understands the complexities of design, build and execute more than anything. [VIDEO]

If I had to choose between network television and YouTube, I would choose YouTube every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I mean, I enjoy Seinfeld too, but on the whole YouTube is both more entertaining and vastly more useful and educational than network television. Not because the content has the highest production values, but because the content matches my interests and needs. That's the true power of targeted advertising. It allows creators to focus on niches that can't be served by content produced for a mass audience. Even large 'niches' get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for network television. Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is fine for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can. And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist. [1] Leno: [LINK] [2] Dodd: [VIDEO]